What a trope is an emergency room! Television depictions which remain in the ER maybe for the entire length of the show, short cameos in films, and in our minds, emergency rooms loom large. They mean tragedy, possible death. All we need is one image of a those blues and whites, a few beeps, a little bit of rushing around, and our brains know it’s bad.

For many, though, the emergency room serves as primary healthcare. Without health insurance, seeing a PCP can be difficult or impossible. I, however, am blessed to have health insurance and I have almost no understanding of the health insurance or the healthcare industry. I did find this to be an interesting perspective from a doctor and contributor. I am lucky to be able to be ignorant on these fronts, I suppose.

Earlier this week, Chas and I spent the day in an emergency room in San Jose, California. Chas had/has an infection on the inside of his nose and increasingly resembled Nicole Kidman’s depiction of Virginia Wolf in The Hours. We left Oakland and on the way to points south, I called and was able to book an appointment with an ENT in San Jose, obviously, a benefit of being insured. We had four hours to kill before the appointment so Nicole and I headed to Stanford and gave ourselves a tour while I looked to buy postage stamps. At 12:30, we arrived for the 1 o’clock appointment at the San Jose Regional Medical Center. The ENT saw Chas, gave some tips, asked some questions, and sent him across the parking lot to the ER so that he could “as quickly as possible” get a CT scan. Because of the short notice, the fastest way to get a CT scan and see if the infection was spreading (possibly to his brain) and would require surgery, would be to wait in the ER for a CT scanning room.

Immediately upon entering the ER waiting room, I had two realizations. 1. I am so fortunate (knock on wood) to have really never entered an ER waiting room before and 2. This is what it looks like to use the ER for primary care.

Chas was instantly swooped up by a male nurse checker-inner-man who somehow maintained positivity throughout the day. I watched him swish in and out of doors, speak to non-English speakers, incur rudeness, collect the angry friends of a man who’d been hit by a car, attempt alternative pronunciations of several names, and just continue smiling. I settled into a plastic seat to finish my book, reminding myself over and over again: do not touch anything.

It’s a little bit like a low energy, high anxiety video game. Breathe to the left because the woman to my right frightens me. Dodge the trajectory of that sneeze. And those coughs. Change positions in the plastic seat as a foot falls asleep. Eavesdrop on the man breathing into a plastic bag without getting too close. Listen to each name intently, waiting to hear “Chas Ebb-ee.” Oogle at the baby with the pink cheeks, guess what language I hear, look out the window, and repeat, repeat and repeat.

It was pretty apparent to me that for most of the people in the ER waiting room, this meant going to the doctor. This meant, I’m sick and I’d like antibiotics and so I’ll wait here for five miserable hours to see a professional. From the elderly in wheelchairs, to the infants being clutched by doe-eyed young moms, this was the only option. If I were legitimately sick and had to wait in that room, I think I’d lose it, maybe storm to the back, fake someone else’s name, anything to get out of that perilous purgatory. Because I’ve been lucky and I have the choice.

When a shirtless 20-something man with blood covering the lower half of his face rolled in in a wheelchair holding his side, I had to try hard to not stare. Easier thought, than done. His friends did not want security to call the police.

When we finally left with the news that Chas did not need surgery and we could leave San Jose and San Jose Regional Medical Center forever, it was after 5 p.m. We’d put in a day’s work, knew we’d be covered, and only had to sacrifice a copay the cost of a Wow Air flight. And we got to drive away, knowing that when we need medical care, we can pretty easily get it.

Like plastic and cockroaches, at the end of the world, there will be the pain that humans have incurred. Because what we do to one another is never the end. Like a contagious virus, hurt spreads. It multiplies. And expands and splashes and pings off and lands elsewhere, and sometimes it explodes.

This piece isn’t about me (other disclaimer: it contains way too many competing metaphors). I’ve been so incredibly fortunate with my family, my husband, my friends, my people. I’ve pretty much always been equipped to handle the hurt that’s handed to me, by my kids, strangers, whomever and if it ever felt too hard to receive the secondary trauma of my job, I’ve had yoga, therapy, acupuncture, writing. I repeat–I am so fortunate. But not everyone is.

If you’re interested in crime and social justice and Sarah Koenig’s voice (like I am) Serial Season 3 did not hardly get enough buzz and it deserves your ears. In it, Sarah and her team–all of whom seem to have equally difficult-to-spell last names–go to East Cleveland and cover court proceedings for weeks. Why don’t I know who any of the waiflike musical acts on SNL are? Because who has time for pop culture when there are enthralling crime podcasts to listen to?

In episode three of this season of Serial, there’s one bit of dialogue I couldn’t, and still can’t, get out of my head. It’s spoken by a civil rights attorney, Paul Cristallo, who previously represented the Cleveland Police Department. Sarah and team cover a small core of men who are in the grips of the criminal justice system. “In the grips” honestly feels like the best way of describing it because CPD won’t let them go and none of it feels fair or positive or just or even clear. It’s so damn messy.

In the exchange below, Erimius is the man in the grips and this is the 137 shots case in which Cristallo represented one of the families. What resonates with me in the exchange below is the stickiness of the hate that’s been thrown. Cristallo articulates something I think often–that hurt and hate and injustice don’t just absorb into the earth after they’re flung. And the evils we allow to perpetuate, will do just that.

“Erimius’s case is an order of magnitude smaller than the 137 shots case or the Tamir Rice case. No one’s going to shout his name during a protest. Paul told me, the smaller cases, they matter because they ricochet.

He’s watched a lot of people go through incidents like this. He says, this beating will knock around inside Erimius’s head, and then it will rebound off of him out into the city.

Paul Cristallo

You know, as much as you want to talk about how we need to come together as a society. And Black Lives Matters, and All Life Matters. And the police have a hard job. And you got to listen to what the police tell you to do. And you got to obey the law, and don’t be a criminal.

I mean, the reality is now, you’ve just created somebody who is, I mean, he’s this walking perpetuation of don’t trust the police. He now knows that that happened, and all he had on him was a blunt in his own apartment complex. In his own apartment complex—not late at night. No drugs, no alcohol, no gun, no criminal activity, but the blunt. And that’s what happened to him.

This will mess with him. If you stick with this story, and we follow him, you’ll see. I mean, it’ll fuck with him. He has family. He has friends. They’re all going to know what happened. They’re all going to see the pictures.

And so for him, now, this becomes part of his life script. This has become something that is going to be retold and retold. And photos are going to be shared and re-shared, you know, on, and on, and on, and on. And this is just one guy. This is just one incident in Euclid, Ohio.”

When a person is hurt by some other person, known or not, some circumstance, some situation he or she is born into, that hurt remains.

Hearing about the shooting at Frederick Douglass High School a week ago, obviously I was saddened and angry and hurting for this city. But I also felt what I always feel when something horrendous happens in Baltimore, I feel the past and the future. I feel that ricochet. Because that single incident, is hardly a single incident. It’s the hurt of the student, his family member, maybe the employee who’s “going to live.” How hurt must you already be to go into a school and shoot an educator? How broken? How confused and pained and angry? That shooter was not born that way. Will he die that way?

An English teacher from Douglass wrote an op-ed about the larger picture here and I agree with him. Look at what we are asking our children to tolerate, and then thrive anyway? What?

From what I’ve read, the shooter at Douglass seems pretty terrible, which comes as no surprise. But this story is like root vegetables before they’re picked. What we see are the leaves, the foliage. What’s beneath is utterly different. And it matters even more than the leaves. The potato, the carrot, the turnip. They’re made of the stuff that happened first, to that once tiny seed as it fought to get bigger. Maybe it was inadequate housing, maybe it was abuse, maybe even the trash on the streets bothered him. How can you think you deserve more when you haven’t been shown that? How can you even know what to reach for?

And like the hurt before February 8, 2019, there’ll be more hurt after as a result of the shooting. It’s like a rock thrown in a pond sending ripples and then another rock into those ripples. Circles of ripples are crashing against one another. It’s enough to drive you mad.

Baggage is hard to carry but it’s even harder to drop off. I don’t have the answer, aside from “be born with a good support system and into a great and stable family” or as Wilbur Wright put it in 1910, “If I were giving a young man advice as to how he might succeed in life, I would say to him, pick out a good father and mother, and begin life in Ohio.”

That’s not easy advice to follow.

What I do have though is more unsolicited advice, one of my favorite things to give out right before I put my foot in my mouth. My advice is to put out the good stuff, to get rid of hate and hurt some other way aside from putting it on someone else. My advice is to remember that the ghastly things that happen in long-maligned neighborhoods are incredibly complex and that some people were never given a real shot at something different and to pretend otherwise is what I now think of as “The Ben Carson Effect.” That it doesn’t mean those neighborhoods and people aren’t capable of more or don’t deserve better, it’s just really fucking hard to obtain it.

So put out the good. Fill others’ buckets instead of emptying them. This might be in complete contradiction of last week’s blog, but why waste breath on something negative? (Thank you to both Erins–Drew and Cyphers-Greenhalgh–for sending me such sentiments.) There’s enough nastiness and ugliness and hurt swirling around, throw the opposite out into the universe.

From my favorite poem “The Desiderata” by Max Ehrmann,

“With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.”

…And know that not everyone has been given the same chances, the same hope, or the same treatment. So at the end of the world, there will be plastic and there will be cockroaches, but do not let there be hate.

There are plenty of famous and even ubiquitous episodes of Seinfeld. See also this blog. One of the most famous is in the George Costanza collection, an episode called “The Comeback,” though a more ubiquitous name may be “Jerk Store.”

In this episode George, who works for the Yankees organization, is in a business meeting. George, unabashedly eating shrimp, is met with “Hey George the Ocean called, they are running outta shrimp” by a character named Reilly–nondescript white-man-business-type. The whole boardroom erupts in laughter and George, mouth full of shrimp, looks bewildered. On his drive home, George explodes with what he thinks is the ultimate comeback for Reilly: “The jerk store called. They’re running outta you!” He tries out the line on his friends who are unimpressed. Though George is undeterred.

Later, George finds out that Reilly has moved to Akron, Ohio to work for Firestone Tires. George books a flight to Akron under false pretenses of handing out free snow tires at the Yankees games. George, in the Firestone version of the Yankees’ boardroom, shovels shrimp into his mouth once again, recalling the earlier scene. Reilly uses, “The ocean called,” again and receives the same reaction as he had before. And George happily launches into “Oh yea? Well, the jerk store called. They’re running outta you!” to which Reilly replies that it doesn’t matter because George is their all time best seller. Again, the crowd loves it. George replies, “Oh yea? Well I slept with your wife,” and the crowd is silent. Another man says quietly to George, “His wife is in a coma.”

In this fictional story, George’s desire to go back and use his line sends him on a flight to northeastern Ohio where he’s again torn apart. Of course, for most of us, when we think of a great line or speech later on, we do not book a flight in order to say our piece. Maybe we mumble it to ourselves, write in a journal, call our moms, but largely, the thing we wish we could have said, goes unsaid. And in this case, I feel George. Because the weight of what I didn’t say is sometimes mentally monstrous to carry around. The burden of the perfect retort or lesson I could’ve taught that person is often a lot to hold.

There’s a comedy bit I heard on Pandora once (cannot remember who the comedian was) with a real life example of “what could have been said” that goes the way we typically expect. The comedian is on a plane, using his phone when it becomes time to seal the cabin and take off. The woman in the seat next to him, whom he does not know, says, “You need to turn off your phone.” He knows that you don’t have to do that anymore and says that to her. She repeats, “You need to turn off your phone.” Again the comedian says to her, “You don’t have to do that anymore.” The woman says her piece a third time and the comedian complies and turns off his phone, to not create a scene.

He ends the bit with, “And now I think about her every day.”

I get it. This is me. If I don’t say what I needed to, or like the comedian, I do, but I am not understood or really heard, I will quite literally think about it forever.

One of my favorite pastimes is to say in my head, what I wished I had said out loud. See also this post. Do we all do this? Live an experience and then later plan the perfect response, a killer speech, or the best comeback. It’s amazing what a little space and time to think can sound like aloud…in my head.

A few weeks ago I taught a “candlelit” yoga class. I taught the “candlelit” at a different studio for a few months and was familiar with the setting of the dimmed lights and the battery-operated candles. I set everything up in the studio and went back to the desk to check people in. I always left the front dimmers on for the first 40 minutes of class–I liked the ambiance and it allowed people to see their own balancing in postures.

But when I returned to the room, the lights were off. I turned them back on and began to teach. About 30 seconds into Sun A, a male yogi whisper-yelled to me, “The lights are supposed to be off! This is a candlelit class!”

Stunned, I ignored him and continued teaching the class. About a minute later, the same man followed me across the room and said it again as I adjusted someone else’s spine in downward facing dog. Again, I ignored him and continued to cue the class. Like a child throwing a hissy fit, he marched over and turned the lights off himself. I spent the subsequent 56 minutes considering whether or not to turn the dimmers back on and planning what to say to him after class.

I was a little trippy over my words that class because I couldn’t stop thinking about this guy’s gall and because I was in my head thinking about how to address him on his way out. He had undermined my method, interrupted our flow, and weirdly approached me as I had my hands on someone else’s hips.

Class ended. The man headed to shower, came out, snidely thanked me for the lavender towel, and then left. It may have just been me but he had the smuggest look on his stupid face. And I did not say anything. So much like that nameless comedian, and like George before him, I cannot stop thinking about it.

It’s like I’ve got my own little court of justice in my head and my mind will not rest until what’s deserved is delivered. I spend a lot of energy with my girls encouraging self-advocacy and reminding them to ask for what they need. And sometimes, I just don’t do it myself.

I think what’s worse than the perpetrator, Reilly, the woman on the plane, the guy in the yoga class, getting away with something–quite honestly something he/she might never think of again–what’s worse is the weight of what I could have said.

I am not advocating for going around throwing insults at people, saying “Yes you do look fat in those jeans,” or openly telling people their way is the wrong way. But when someone else steps into my territory and disrupts my peace, I think it’s best to speak. We spend a lot of time tip-toeing, apologizing for standing in the way, mumbling “sorry” when what we really mean is “excuse me.” In this era of lies and misleading statements and alternative truths, I think it’s best to live unburdened, to unload the weight of what we could have said. And just say it.

Once upon a January Friday night, back in 2009 when we all had less bags under our eyes and less baggage in our emotional closets, I sat scheming with Lauren and Chas in the living room of the apartment we lovingly called “Four Reasons.” Lauren and I had many a raucous event in that disproportionately large living room in Mt. Vernon, Baltimore but on this particular weekend, we were bogged down by January-ness. We needed to do something, something irrational, something adventurous. And in that scheming session, “Seacrets in January” was born.

A week later we gathered some of our most irrational, yet lovely friends and hit the road for Ocean City, Maryland with the goal of spending a January Saturday at Seacrets. Also known as Jamaica, USA, Seacrets is a bar that spans several blocks, spreads likely numerous easily contractable diseases in the heat of the July sun, serves a few palatable alcoholic slushies, and attracts a crowd of summertime twenty-somethings, looking to sin. Seacrets’ Tagline: “Find us and get lost.” We figured the pits of January would be less contagious, less offensive, but just as much fun. Maybe we’d find the spirit of summer.

At the time, the Ebys had a beach house (they don’t anymore) and my dad had a Honda Odyssey (he still does). We snagged the key with directions on how to turn on the water and the heat. Without any expectations, we had a few liquids at the house and then cabbed to Seacrets.

We were greeted by a live band, not good, not awful, but live and entertaining enough for some early-twenties wanderers from chilly Baltimore with an agenda that contained only “fun.” There was confetti and there were balloons and there was perspiration. And a tradition ensued.

On February 9th, we will make this trek for the 11th time. We were scheduled for last weekend but Seacrets is mysteriously “closed” which we can only guess means that they are doing their annual cleanse–scraping chlamydia off of the toilet seats. Seacrets in January has, in the past few years, become “Seacrets in January in February,” which is fine. We will adapt. However, this last minute reschedule has cost us some loyal soldiers–Tim and Maddy, who are both valued core attendees.

Over the decade of Seacrets in January (in February), we have gained and we have lost. We have gone from the Ebys’ house on West Way to the Sea Bay’s finest accommodations on 61st to the Best Western in the 50s.

We have had drinks and we have brought a pregnant (read: the pregnant put up with us). We have danced and we have stood awkwardly to the side of the bar. We have eaten late night pizza and we have wrestled strangers in the hallway. We have remembered and we’ve certainly forgotten. Some have fallen asleep at the bar and others kicked out. We have stood on a “bouncing” dance floor and allowed confetti to tumble into our drinks. We’ve welcomed balloon drops at midnight and stayed until the very last one was popped ceremoniously. And we have always eaten breakfast at Layton’s on 92nd, where they have that good ice.

People have come and gone, the tradition has been adjusted, revised, and adapted. Each year, we wonder, will this still be fun? Are we too old for this yet? Valid questions, but fortunately, Chris Eby, our archivist, has kept track of attendees. Although, 2019’s was created for the January 26th date and is subject to additions and subtractions.

Because Chris keeps this note on his phone, pay careful attention to the alternative ways of writing Chris L’s name (my own spelling: Lochdawg) and do not pay attention to the capital letters, or lack thereof. Blog continues below the list.

On this trip, Chas first told me, “I love you” (SIJ ’09). A participant smashed his face on a curb and had to spend the early morning at Atlantic General (SIJ ’16). Another participant decided cops were after him, ran from them, went to the wrong hotel where he, for reasons we do not know, left his wallet, and lost his car keys in a construction site on Coastal Highway (SIJ ’15). It was his 27th birthday.

We’ve seen burst blood vessels in eye sockets (SIJ ’17), enjoyed many early morning prank phone calls (SIJ all years), and watched as someone booped a security guard and charged the stage (SIJ all years).

We’ve tracked the growth and orthodontia of The Benderz. We’ve heard one participant sing Greek pop music to an audience of extremely ungrateful ears (SIJ ’18). We have encouraged a pregnant to tolerate us (SIJ ’18), permanently banned consumption of Double Dog IPAs (SIJ still standing), and watched a new couple form (SIJ ’14)–they’re getting married this June.

Seacrets in January is not normal. It’s magical, it’s lovely, it’s bananas, it’s absurd, it’s irreverent, and it’s so much more. And in the morning, we eat at Layton’s on 92nd. Consider joining this year, find summer in the middle of January in February, and make your mark on the list, and on history.

SIJ ’18. Hanley snuck out even before the prank phone calls in the morning so we superimposed him in (with hooves).